The evolution of safety: The road to CAPS

From comfort to safety systems

Driver assistance systems, originally oriented towards comfort and convenience, are undergoing logical further development to support systems for crash avoidance and are thus also becoming increasingly important for safety in traffic. With the help of outward looking sensors, the car "sees" what is going on in the environment, interprets the situation and recognizes dangerous situations. This information is used to support and warn the driver and, in the future, could even autonomously intervene in emergency situations. The first systems have already been introduced to the market: Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) for example. This system controls the vehicle's speed and automatically maintains a safety gap behind the vehicle ahead on highways and secondary roads.